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Monthly Archives: October 2009

I am lucky enough to have received an invite to try Google Wave (from a friend, not from Google, so I can’t invite anyone else, sorry). This is an amazing tool! My only limitation at this point is that I only have one friend on using Wave and while we enjoy many of the same things, he is in the video production/editing and computer business whilst I am a youth worker. Not a lot of common ground there for collaboration. If you use Wave and are interested in playing around with it, please find me so I have someone to try stuff out with! This would be especially awesome if you are also involved in youth ministry as I am particularly interested in testing ways of using Wave to improve ministry communication and collaboration.

Thanks!

And if you have no idea what Wave is, check this out:

And if you are really interested, here is the 80min Google I/O launch video:

Trust is hard. Especially for those of us who are better at doing things ourselves. While I am eternally grateful for the strong work ethic and independent spirit that is bred in my family, it gets in the way of trust. I am in church ministry, I work with the teenagers, the youth. Though I am an intern now, at the end of my internship I will hopefully have a position doing the same thing (but for more than a year and hopefully for a few more dollars per year). My job and my field require much trust (in unique ways, but not entirely unlike most other professions). Trust is also necessary in relationships. Whether that be professional, familial, or personal.

Trust has been a big thing in my life lately. There is so much that the Lord is leading me to specifically trust him for, including my job, finding a job next year, family, finances, personal theology, friends. My finances have been huge as I am on my own for the first time and figuring out how to survive, plan ahead, tithe, give generously, and have some leisure cash all at the same time. And there’s Rachel, my lovely girlfriend, and money spent with her and traveling to see her (she’s in Denver and I live just south of the Colorado-Wyoming border). Of course there is quite a bit to trust God on there too which involves no money.

But the point of all this is built on my evolving understanding of what trust is. Trust is usually dynamic, though not always (see the story of George Muller). By this I mean that it is not generally done apart from progressive action. Trust is not passive. The trust God is leading me into mostly requires action on my behalf. Trust in finance requires budgeting and prudent spending. Trust with Rachel requires much prayer and open communication with her and also concerning her with certain trusted mentors.Trust in my job requires that I do my best while continually going before God in prayer. Trust in a job search requires networking, prayer, applications and resumes well written, interviews well prepared for, etc.

You might notice a common thread of prayer. You may think that I am some sort of crazy prayer warrior or super-Christian who spends all my time on my knees. Quite the opposite really. I believe strongly in the power of prayer. I don’t know how to fit all that I think to be true into a nice, neat systematic theology, but I know that one of the best methods for me to be able to trust in God is to talk with him. That means I listen as well as talk! My other means are to be reading scripture every day and to seek council from godly mentors and friends.

So even as I endeavor and struggle to place my trust into the hands of the sovereign Godhead, I need to be about my disciplines to foster that trust. May you as well, and even better than I am.

In The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis, there is a chapter by this title wherein the protagonists discover that after the Narnian apocalypse, there is a re-creation of everything they have known about the country which is “more real” than the one they knew before. After pondering this and at the prompting of Farsight the eagle, they travel all the way to the garden from The Magician’s Nephew in the far west of Narnia and at the highest of elevations. Within the walls of the garden, it is as if Narnia begins all over again, though seeming larger and “more real”. Borrowing from Plato and possibly the Apostle Paul (see 1 Cor 13.12, tho this is cited apart from it’s context), Lewis shows that in this eternity or spiritual reality, things are truer than before. Additionally, they become progressively more so, the further up and further in the characters travel.Likewise, on my own meandering journey through life, I find that the more I enter into something the bigger and more complex it gets (like the stable in The Last Battle, the namesake of this blog). Whether this is in my own theology, experience, my work with youth and as a minister of the gospel of Christ, relationships, etc… things continue to become larger and more intricate whether I desire that to be true or not.This fact of experience (one which I believe is common to every human being) is the thread by which I will attempt to weave together my posts.